My tinfoil hat tells me that either neither Tesla nor Einstein were humans, OR both were in some sort of communication with aliens.
I know on its face it sounds like horseshit... but with over 100 billion people ever lived on earth... how come we have so few geniuses that truly push the whole human kind forward 10x faster than all people combined thru a previous ten centuries?
Even more - if we assume its just a coincident or that they had such good DNA, or their parents were geniuses before... then how come it doesn't happen again? How come we don't have such huge brains like Tesla or Einstein today? Sure there are many super smart humans among us... but not a single one sticks out like Tesla or Einstein did in their old days.
There are probably many geniouses that came and went through the ages, the problem is that of “financial stability / partnerships”. If I’m too busy making Widgets for a company in order to feed my family, I dont have any energy left to do Creative stuff. Isaac Newton was wealthy so could devote time to pursue the sciences, the rest of us are preparing TPG reports for the bean counters. The person who can cure cancer is too busy taking his kids to KungFu/Soccer practice, hogged by a demanding socialite wife who doesn’t allow him to steal time from domestic chores.
Of all the renaissance era scientists you could have picked, Newton is probably the single worst example. Read his early life [1] on Wiki. Father, a "wild and extravagant man" died shortly after he was born. His mother remarried a reverend and left him with with the grandparents. He wasn't fond of his parents, having threatened to burn the house to the ground - them along with it. Then he went to high school, where he did poorly until he was 'removed' to a new school. His mother, now widowed a second time, tried to make him a farmer.. and so on, and so forth. When studying law at Cambridge he even worked as a servant to make ends meet.
His young life is like something out of Jerry Springer.
Though I think it offers a good moral. Life is what you make of it. This is far more true today than during Newton's life. The big difference is that somehow we, collectively, seem to have lost our willingness to do what it takes to leave us in the sort of position your envision Newton as somehow having been warped into. Remember his 'magnum opus' would not come until he was 43 years old in 1685 - most of his life prior spent in complete disregard.
Do the startup thing. Tesla worked as a ditch digger for $2 a day after his startup went belly up. He was 30, I think. That must have been depressing. A then a year later he confounded another company and developed the AC induction motor.
You might end up as MGTOW because your socialite wife probably won't be on the same page, but hey... No balls, no glory.
I've also thought about this, though not your conclusions.
Pushing society forward tends to require society's help. And a big issue is we've become far less tolerant and more cynical of change. We certainly consider ourselves tolerant but that's mostly on a small subset of all issues - primarily just social stuff like sexuality. By contrast imagine we did not have electric poles up today and somebody suggested we string up these poles all around the country. And they also suggested we wire them up with enough juice flowing through them to kill anything that happened to touch them and something else at the same time - and that these wires could also easily start fires and more. Society wouldn't even consider it - preposterous, unsafe, won't anybody think of the children, blah blah blah. A solar farm frying some birds gets headlines today. I mean... really? Society used to be more tolerant to risk, challenge, and capable of dealing with uncertainty. That opens up the doors of possibility.
Another big change is that I think many peoples' goals in life have changed from moving society forward, to just earning a lot of money. Revolutionary invention is not really the best way to make lots of money in society. In the pure sciences, like physics, it's positively fruitless. Even in the more monetizable fields, it's extremely high risk and the rewards are are wildly variable. 20 years from now Elon Musk could easily be the richest person in history, but he could also just as easily be bankrupt or approaching it. Getting back to the first point, what happens when the first person dies on a SpaceX mission? What if the two people SpaceX plans to send around the moon end up dying catastrophically? It really shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but society would flip a lid, government would try to regulate, and it would be a catastrophe far greater than the loss of life. Dangerous calculus if your life's purpose is money.
Ultimately we have a conservative society that's risk averse and driven by money more than by invention. It's not a good recipe for cooking up revolutionary change.
I know on its face it sounds like horseshit... but with over 100 billion people ever lived on earth... how come we have so few geniuses that truly push the whole human kind forward 10x faster than all people combined thru a previous ten centuries?
Even more - if we assume its just a coincident or that they had such good DNA, or their parents were geniuses before... then how come it doesn't happen again? How come we don't have such huge brains like Tesla or Einstein today? Sure there are many super smart humans among us... but not a single one sticks out like Tesla or Einstein did in their old days.